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      Overlooked No More: Dorothy Spencer, Film Editor Sought Out by Big Directors

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      She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More

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      ‘The Good Nurse’ Review: Bad Medicine

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      This true-crime tale, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, dramatizes the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who was discovered to be a serial killer.Tobias Lindholm narrates a sequence from his film featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.JoJo Whilden/Netflix No one knows how many patients Charles Cullen murdered in his career as a hospital nurse. Cullen confessed to 29 intentional deaths; some experts speculate the actual count may be as high as 400. Why poison the people entrusted to his care? Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences at New Jersey State Prison, has yet to share his motives, and the “The Good Nurse,” a grim feel-bad drama by the director Tobias Lindholm (a co-writer of the feel-good Oscar winner “Another Round”) isn’t interested in scrounging up a guess. When the film’s Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, tries to explain himself, Lindholm muffles his voice with a police siren and wailing violins.Instead, Lindholm and the scriptwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, set out to answer a more fundamental question: how did Cullen get away with it for 16 years across nine different hospitals? Were his employers too strapped for resources and personnel to notice — or were they so scared of lawsuits that they selfishly pushed out Cullen to become another community’s problem without so much as a single bad letter of reference, let alone a call to outside authorities?Jessica Chastain, right, with Eddie Redmayne in “The Good Nurse.”JoJo Whilden/Netflix The movie implies the latter. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns, who were both raised in countries with nationalized health care, view the United States medical system as a business centered on having patients, not helping them. They’ve fictionalized the names of the hospitals, as well as the names of the dead, to give themselves leeway to reconstruct Cullen’s last place of work as a house of horrors shot in such dingy, dungeon-y grays by the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes that Dr. Frankenstein would fit right in.Nearly every scene is an indignity: corpses left neglected in beds, loved ones grieving next to the sickly glow of a vending machine, managers haranguing their exhausted staff about the cost of coffee filters. Even the story’s heroine, a nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) who provides the only empathy in this miserable tale, is also one of its victims. The single mother of two is tirelessly devoted to her patients despite a heart condition that puts her at high risk for a stroke. Yet her own hospital won’t provide her with health insurance until she’s worked there for a year, a common plight for contract workers that Lindholm sees as a moral affront that falls somewhere between bitter irony and indentured servitude.There’s a touch of Gogol-esque satire in a subplot in which two investigating detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) are thwarted by hospital bureaucrats who downplay deaths as “unexplainable incidents,” in the words of a chillingly placid risk manager (Kim Dickens), and, when low on excuses, put the cops on hold with punishing Muzak. Similarly, while Redmayne mostly plays his murderer at a low hum, he allows himself one scene to unleash his big mime energy, theatrically gasping and twitching and letting his long fingers crawl over his face. The moment is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” but “The Good Nurse” offers no assurances that its danger is safely locked away. In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.The Good NurseRated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Good Nurse’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      Stream These 7 Movies and Shows Before They Leave Netflix This Month

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      The losses for U.S. subscribers aren’t that heavy in November, but a few bona fide greats and quirky favorites are among them.Fans of made-for-cable sci-fi, quirky stand-up comedy and romantic comedies will want to jump on the titles leaving Netflix in the United States in November. And if you’re looking for a superhero sendup or one of Spielberg’s first cracks at serious drama, a few of those are leaving soon as well. Move them to the top of you “to watch” list while there’s time. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Suffragette’ (Nov. 15)The director Sarah Gavron assembled a high-caliber cast — including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and (in a brief but memorable role) Meryl Streep — for this stirring account of the women’s equality movement in London, circa 1912. Mulligan stars as a laundry worker who is swept up into the suffragette protests, which the screenwriter Abi Morgan is careful to frame as a continuing concern. “Suffragette” asks compelling questions that continue to resonate, about the responsibility of the vote, the impenetrable structure of power and the place of violent resistance in the politics of protest.Stream it here.‘Donald Glover: Weirdo’ (Nov. 18)Donald Glover wasn’t particularly famous yet when he released this stand-up special in 2012; he was still best known as a supporting player on “Community,” and he makes a side reference here to the recent release of his first EP. His primary focus, at that time, was still this stage act, a fast-paced set filled with pop-culture references, social commentary and semi-surrealist observations. Some of the references have dated, as one would expect from an of-the-moment special released 10 years ago. But the funniest and smartest material, covering relationships, sex and (especially) racism, is timeless.Stream it here.‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ (Nov. 30)Twelve years after the underwhelming sequel “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” Renée Zellweger returned to the cozy cardigans of Helen Fielding’s heroine for one more go-round. The third film in the series has Bridget finally at peace with her weight but still struggling for satisfaction with her career and love life — and the latter concern becomes especially keen when she gets pregnant. She’s unsure of the father; it could be new beau Jack (Patrick Dempsey) or her old flame Mark Darcy (a returning Colin Firth). Zellweger’s delightful characterization creates a breezy mood, and if this installment is featherweight even by rom-com standards, our affection for the characters holds it aloft.Stream it here.‘Clueless’ (Nov. 30)This 1995 comedy from Amy Heckerling catapulted a slew of careers (including those of Alicia Silverstone, Donald Faison, Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd), as well as an entire ’90s glut of teen comedy adaptations of classic literature (including “10 Things I Hate About You,” “She’s All That” and “Cruel Intentions”). But the first remains the best. The writer-director Heckerling, who directed “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” continued to display an impeccable ear and eye for the dialogue and behavior of her teen protagonists, and she managed the miraculous feat of writing a script that satires their vapidness and privilege without condescending them.Stream it here.‘The Color Purple’ (Nov. 30)Whoopi Goldberg made her film debut in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker’s — a stunning bit of trivia, considering how confident and assured her work is here. (She was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.) She stars as Celie, a young Black woman in the midcentury rural South who must cope with racism, cruelty, sexism and worse, yet manages to find her true self, and the joy within. It was Spielberg’s first attempt at serious, prestige drama, and while those growing pains are occasionally apparent, the picture is nevertheless directed with sensitivity and grace. Co-stars Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey (also making her film debut) were deservedly nominated for Oscars as well, while Danny Glover and Adolph Caesar are memorably monstrous in the key male roles.Stream it here.‘Hancock’ (Nov. 30)The current (and seemingly endless) superhero vogue was barely underway back in 2008 — the summer of “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” — when the director Peter Berg released this clever subversion of comic book conventions. Co-written by the “Breaking Bad” mastermind Vince Gilligan, it stars Will Smith as a burned-out, alcoholic superhero whose careless escapades are more likely to cause serious property damage than save any lives. But when he rescues an opportunistic public relations man (Jason Bateman, at his smarmiest), his attempts at media rehabilitation just cause more problems. (Charlize Theron co-stars as the P.R. man’s wife, who turns out to be much more than a homemaker.) Some viewers resisted “Hancock” because it cast Smith against type as an unlikable antihero … maybe the timing is better now?Stream it here.‘Stargate SG-1’: Seasons 1-10 (Nov. 30)The phrase “cult favorite” gets thrown around for just about anything with an identifiable fan base these days, diminishing its true meaning as a badge of honor and admission among certain subsets of antisocial weirdos. But unless you’re really, really into low-rent turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi, you may not even know that the hit 1994 film “Stargate” was turned into a television series — much less one that ran for a staggering 200+ episodes. Richard Dean Anderson, of “MacGyver,” takes over for Kurt Russell as the Air Force Colonel who discovers the Stargate, an alien pathway to other worlds and times. The mythology is elaborate and the scripts are occasionally silly, but it offers engaging characters, go-for-broke performances and hours of low-calorie entertainment.Stream it here. More

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      Sigourney Weaver Has Us All Fooled: She’s Really Quite Silly

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      In her life onscreen, Sigourney Weaver has faced down ghosts, aliens and serial killers, romanced the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson and studied the clannish movements of gorillas in the mist and of suburban swingers in Connecticut. But before you knew her for any of those feats, an outrageous stage performance bestowed a lesson that has spanned the length of her five-decade career.“It was so good for me,” Weaver said, “to play a girl with a hedgehog in her vagina for a few months.”The year was 1976, and the production was “Titanic,” an Off Broadway play by Weaver’s frequent stage collaborator Christopher Durang (not her frequent film collaborator, James Cameron, who would make his own, very different “Titanic” two decades later). Durang’s sex farce asked her to play roles that ran the gamut from a black widow with deep décolletage to a pigtailed girl hiding a hedgehog in her vagina. The New York Times, in an amused review, described Weaver as “a cover girl beauty with a dry wit” and the play’s principal attraction.But what’s all that praise worth when weighed against one withering comment? One night, after an Actors Studio teacher came to see “Titanic,” Weaver asked for his take on her performance.“Well,” he sniffed, “I didn’t really feel that you had a hedgehog in your vagina.”This season Weaver will be seen in four very different roles, including a teenager in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and an abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesUndone by the criticism, Weaver spent the next day overthinking things. Every waking minute was devoted to imagining the hedgehog and mapping out the little creature’s wants and desires; by the time she was onstage that night, throwing her leg onto a table to feed the hedgehog some lettuce, she could swear she felt a real animal moving to claim its prize.And how was all that hard work received? “There was not a laugh in the house,” she said. “It was absolute stone-cold horror.”Well, the performance earned one laugh, at least — a rueful, belated one from Weaver herself, as we sat by the beach at the Venice Film Festival in August. “I think the Actors Studio and comedy may not go together,” she told me, chuckling.Acting can sometimes be a battle between intellect and instinct, and by either measure, the 73-year-old Weaver is formidable. Co-stars talk about the way she marks up her scripts, scribbling down the motivations behind every line, action or lifted prop; onscreen, she projects that intelligence in a calm, cool way and can handily outthink any scene partner. But Weaver’s natural instincts have proved important, too, ever since her first starring role as the resourceful Ellen Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.”“She’s reduced to instinct and survival, and goes from this person who knows the rules to someone who’s just flying by the seat of her pants,” Weaver said. “So I got a very good drenching in that right away.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.Some things about Weaver are immutable, like her height (she stands nearly six feet tall) and honeyed voice, but she is credible in comedy, drama and action tentpoles and has put together an unusually fluid career that’s on full display this season. In September, you might have caught her in the indie comedy “The Good House,” in which she played Hildy, a witty, oft-soused real estate agent; the next month, New York Film Festival audiences met Weaver’s Norma, a wealthy woman having an affair with Joel Edgerton in the fraught, Paul Schrader-directed drama “Master Gardener.”Weaver can currently be seen as Virginia, an abortion-rights activist in the period drama “Call Jane” (out this weekend) and in December, she reunites with Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” despite the fact that her character died in the first film. Since the “Avatar” movies are shot mainly via motion capture, Cameron crafted a whole new role for Weaver, and it’s a corker: She plays Kiri, a 14-year-old, blue-skinned alien.It’s a role that reminded Weaver of her own adolescence and the winding path she has carved since. Born Susan Weaver to a television-executive father and actress mother in Manhattan, she picked the name Sigourney out of “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager, an act of willful reinvention in a life that would be full of such choices. “But I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” she told me in Venice. “I’m pure instinct, and I’ve learned to trust those instincts.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Weaver as a 14-year-old Na’vi girl in the “Avatar” sequel. Early on “I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began.”20th Century StudiosDoes this feel like an unusually prolific phase of your career?I’ve just been doing one film a year, but they’re all coming up at the same time as if I threw some magic beans out the window and suddenly there were all these great plants. But I’m happy about it because I’ve always secretly had this dream of being an actress in a repertory theater. Once that didn’t happen, I thought, “Doesn’t matter, I can do it myself. I’ll play the maid one day and the queen another, and I’ll keep jumping around, hopscotching from one genre and one kind of role to another.” So it’s a lovely expression of my earliest dream.When you pick a role, is it informed by the last role you played?It’s never about the role for me, ever. It’s about the script, I don’t even care who the director is. I was an English major, I can’t help it: I know about structure — beginning, middle, end — and I know the story has to be about more than the people in it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, I don’t care how good you are, it’s not for me. The next thing is the director and their vision, and to work with someone who’s passionate. Not with someone who says, “Well, let’s get this over with.”You’ve had those experiences?Only a little. And that’s why I decided I would stay in New York, after going out to L.A. in the ’70s and waiting to be seen by casting people. I felt that in New York, we talked much more about the nobility of our profession, how important it was and also how much fun it was. And being around actors at that time in L.A., there was a real feeling that it wasn’t a noble profession, that you were there to get famous or something. I found it all too confusing, so I went back.Tell me about playing Virginia, the abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Virginia seemed to pop right out of me. I could have been Virginia in another life, I just felt her rangy style in my body. But it was very hard to get the movie financed. We tried to shoot it in other states, and no state wanted us, and Connecticut finally gave us a place to shoot.Were those states rejecting the film because it was about abortion?Maybe they didn’t like the script either, but it certainly was the subject matter. They didn’t want to be tarred with that.A prelude of events to come.Such a prelude, and I didn’t see it coming. I just thought, “Well, it was probably a conservative mayor, or whatever.” I didn’t see the big picture.Opposite Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane.” Weaver said it was hard to find a state to film in, in large part because the subject was abortion. Officials “didn’t want to be tarred with that.”Wilson WebbDo you remember your political awakening as a young woman?Freshman year, I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, and a bunch of girls were burning their bras — I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It was quite an exciting place, and I happened to be at college during a very political time. Almost every spring there would be protests, sit-ins. Every time I talked about politics, my father [Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows] would say, “Are you on drugs?” And I’d say, “No, not yet. Give me time.”Did you grow up in a conservative family?Well, my parents seemed quite conservative. I worked for a Republican congressman on Capitol Hill for a summer, but I never voted for a Republican. I think as an artist, we tell these stories about self-expression, about the people’s welfare and how vulnerable they are, and I don’t know how you could be a Republican and tell the stories that actors tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure there are lots of Republicans that could, but you have to be able to play anyone, which forces you to have compassion for people with other positions and reinforces your conviction that people need freedom.What were you like at 14, the age you play in “Avatar: The Way of Water”?It was a period of my life when my parents were traveling a lot, and I felt a little like a lost soul. I was this tall when I was 12, and I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began. I remember so well being that age, and to be given an opportunity to revisit that in a safe way is a great gift, isn’t it?The role is motion-capture. Do you recognize yourself in Kiri, or does the character seem like someone else?I’ve only seen a couple of scenes, but all I hope is that it’s truthful. When I would do my warm-up, I was able to drop 60 years and feel the 14-year-old bubbling up, and then I just let her go.Does she fall in love?I don’t know if I can answer that question. I know that she just wants to be with Spider, a human boy, all the time. Even though she’s seven feet tall and he’s a human, they just complement each other. He actually puts blue on himself to pass, but I don’t think she notices much else besides the fun of being with him and being in the forest. They’re just free urchins at the beginning, and they have a kind of golden life there, even though they’re at war and in hiding.“If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesNorma, the character you play in “Master Gardener,” is at the other end of the spectrum. She makes every situation so fraught — even the way she wields a wine glass is like it’s a loaded gun.She’s certainly one of my favorites. Norma is a really complex character — I saw her referred to as icy, but I think she’s a cauldron.She can operate at a remove, but it’s not an icy remove.I’m so glad you see that because I think there’s a tendency to dismiss older women and, if they’re wealthy, to refer to them as icy. It’s one of the best parts I’ve ever had, but I’ve always avoided that kind of character.She’s a fun character to watch, because she’ll so often say or do something that’s wildly inappropriate.It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had because she is so complex and was never meant to be one thing. There used to be so much emphasis on playing a woman sympathetically, and they only do it to women — nobody worries about the man being sympathetic. Also, I must say, it’s great to play competent women who still have sex lives. It’s something that didn’t used to happen that much in the old days, so I feel very optimistic for me and my peers that as long as they make good stories, older women are going to be a part of it, because they are very powerful in our real lives.When do you feel most powerful in your own life?Gosh, I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Powerful. Well, the Supreme Court decision made me feel very un-powerful, and I think that’s what a lot of women are feeling.In the 1980s, as you were coming into your own as a movie star, did you feel powerful?Whenever I used to go to Hollywood and have to deal with these different studio heads, I was never comfortable. I always felt incredible sexism there, and a kind of resentment that they had to listen to me because I did have this power and I was smart enough to put several sentences together. I used to think, “Oh, it would be fun to direct, but I don’t want to have to deal with those people.”I remember I was trying to raise money for our theater [she was a founder of the Flea Theater in New York], and I asked a studio I have a good connection with if they would make a charitable donation. And they said, “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to give you a bonus, and you can sign that over to your theater.” I said, “It’s not really the same thing. I can make my own charitable contribution.” I was so astonished by their lack of interest, and you’d think after several movies together that there’d be some kind of mutual respect.“I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” Weaver said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn a 1994 interview, you said, “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”If you’re a woman, they want to know, are you a babe? Are you a comedian? Are you this or are you that? They didn’t know what to do with me. It was always off-the-track directors who would wake up in the middle of the night and go, “Oh, Sigourney Weaver, she could do this.” And then these things would come to me out of nowhere.After “Alien,” I was sent all these serious-person scripts and most of what I’d done was comedy onstage. I thought, “God, when am I going to get back to that?” That has been frustrating because a good comedy is hard to find, and so are love stories — I love them, but they couldn’t really imagine me in a love story. If I came in the room, all the producers would sit down, and if there was a leading man, he’d usually sit down, too, because they wanted someone different, someone much smaller.Did you feel pigeonholed because of your height?If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that. I think because of my career, I’ve kind of fooled people into thinking that I’m a serious person. There are some things I feel quite serious about, but in general, I’m on the silly side. I think that’s why I love working with Jim Cameron — if it’s an adventure, let me at it. But this is something any actor has to deal with. Anytime a movie registers, you get 10 more offers like that — after “Ice Storm” [1997] I got so many mean, cold ladies. I think the only recourse is just find things to surprise yourself, and you’ll surprise your audience.What’s a good example of that?They didn’t want to see me for “Galaxy Quest” [1999], but I thought, “This is my chance to show my own insecurity when I go out to L.A.,” because no matter who you were, [Hollywood] could make you feel as vulnerable as [her character] Tawny feels. It was one of the reasons I made her such a babe: Babes should have all the friends in the world, but I’m not sure they feel secure about that because they think it’s only skin-deep when it’s not.So now that you have planted these magic beans, and by sheer luck they’ve all bloomed at the same time, what do you do with this garden that you have outside your window?I don’t want to pick it! Probably no one will get as much enjoyment out of these four films as I do. Imagining Norma and Hildy and Virginia and Kiri together, I just feel like I hit the jackpot, man.I would love to see those four characters in a room. Who would get along?I’m not sure what Kiri would think being in a room like that — I’m sure she’d find Norma completely terrifying. I guess it would depend on what kind of wine Hildy brought to the gathering. More

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      ‘Armageddon Time’ Review: Hard Lessons About Life in America

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      New York in 1980 is the setting for James Gray’s brooding, bittersweet story of family conflict and interracial friendship.Can you remember the first day of sixth grade? Would you even want to? James Gray, in the opening scene of “Armageddon Time,” his tender and lacerating new film, brings it all back with clammy precision.We are at Public School 173 in Queens, New York, at our desks in Mr. Turkeltaub’s class. It’s 1980 — maybe you’re old enough to remember that, too — and two boys are about to get in trouble, one for mouthing off during roll call and the other for drawing a picture of the teacher (Andrew Polk) with the body of a turkey. It seems like if your name was Turkeltaub and you taught sixth grade you might be able to take the joke, but on the other hand, maybe not being able to take the joke is the whole reason you’re teaching sixth grade in the first place. This is a man, after all, whose job requires him to utter the words “gym is a privilege, people” with a straight face.“Armageddon Time” isn’t about Mr. Turkeltaub, though his contempt for his students helps to propel its plot. It’s not about gym class either, but it is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.The two troublemakers — Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) and Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) — become friends, bonded by their dislike of Turkey (as they call him when he’s out of earshot) and also by the kind of shared interests that connect boys on the edge of adolescence. For all their rebellious bravado in Turkey’s class, there is still something childlike in the way Johnny and Paul approach the world, and a sweet softness in the mannerisms of the young actors who play them.Johnny collects NASA mission patches and dreams of becoming an astronaut. Paul thinks the Beatles will get back together soon. He also tells Johnny — matter-of-factly rather than boastfully — that his family is “super rich.” This isn’t quite true. Paul’s father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), is a boiler repairman. His mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is a home-economics teacher and P.T.A. officer who is considering a run for the local school board. With help from Esther’s parents (Anthony Hopkins and Tovah Feldshuh), they are sending Paul’s older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), to private school, where Paul will eventually join him.In a fairly short time — between the start of school and Thanksgiving, with the election of Ronald Reagan in between — Paul will arrive at a clearer, harsher understanding of how power, status and money work in America, a lesson that will come at Johnny’s expense.Johnny is Black, Paul is white, and even as they navigate the world together, they experience it in different ways. Mr. Turkeltaub may punish them both, but he is much harder on Johnny, calling him an “animal” and ridiculing him in front of his peers. Johnny, who lives with his grandmother, is one of a small number of Black students at the school, and their presence alarms some of the ostensibly tolerant adults in Paul’s family.Interracial friendship is an old and complicated theme in American culture. Think of Ishmael and Queequeg bedded down at the Spouter-Inn in “Moby-Dick,” Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi in “Huckleberry Finn” or Dylan and Mingus tagging up Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude.” In almost every case, the white character’s perception is central (these books are all first-person narratives, and in a palpable if not literal sense, “Armageddon Time” is too). The Black character, however brave, beautiful or tragic he may be, is the vehicle of his companion’s moral awakening.“Armageddon Time” plants itself in this tradition, but it is also honest about the limitations of its own perspective. Gray tells the story of Paul’s discovery of the iniquities of race and class, but doesn’t pretend that this painful knowledge might redeem him, much less rescue Johnny.Nor does the cruelty of American racism come as news — certainly not to Johnny, and not in the Graff household either. They are Jews whose ascent into the American middle class is shadowed by generational memories of Cossacks and Nazis in the old world and less lethal brushes with antisemitism in their new home.Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in the film as Paul’s parents, Esther and Irving Graff.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe moral center of the clan is Esther’s father, Aaron, who has a special fondness for Paul. He’s a gentle, playful, didactic presence in the boy’s life — Hopkins finds the essential grit hiding underneath the twinkle — dispensing gifts and jokes and hard nuggets of wisdom. He’s a comforting presence for Paul, who is terrified of Irving’s violent temper and at an awkward stage in his relationship with Esther.Gray’s filmography — he has directed and written eight features so far, starting with “Little Odessa” in 1995 — can be understood as a series of inquiries into the meaning of home, which is usually somewhere in the outer boroughs of New York. After venturing further afield in his last two movies (the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” and outer space in “Ad Astra”), he has swerved into deeply personal territory.But even as Paul Graff is an unmistakable alter ego, his situation is a version of the predicament faced by the young men played by Joaquin Phoenix in “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers.” His curiosity may push him toward rebellion, adventure and the testing of taboos, but at the same time he is entangled in the warm, sticky tendrils of family obligation and tribal identity.Gray surveys the Graff household with an eye that is both affectionate and critical. (The eye of the director of photography, Darius Khondji, finds the precise colors of coziness and claustrophobia, and the subtle shades of nostalgia and remorse.) A different filmmaker might have made Esther, Irving and Aaron avatars of liberal hypocrisy. They despise Reagan and root for the underdogs. They also send Ted and Paul to a school whose major benefactors include the Trump family, and drop toxic morsels of bigotry into their table talk.But “Armageddon Time” is less interested in cataloging their moral failings than in investigating the contradictions they inhabit, the swirl of mixed messages and ethical compromises that define Paul’s emerging sense of the world and his place in it. He hears a lot — including from one of the Trumps — about hard work and independence, and also about the importance of connections. He is told that the game is rigged against him, and also that it’s rigged in his favor. He’s instructed to fit in and to fight back, to follow his dreams and to be realistic.And Johnny? The messages he receives are much more brutal, though hardly less confusing. But what happens to him can only be guessed, by Paul and the audience, because one of the lessons Paul learns is that his friend’s story was never his to tell.Armageddon TimeRated R. Bad feelings, bad behavior, bad language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In a German ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ History Has a Starring Role

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      More gruesome than previous film adaptations of the novel, a new Netflix feature looks to other conflicts past and present.“All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal World War I novel, has had several onscreen adaptations.The book, which has sold up to 40 million copies since it was released in 1929, tells the story of the German soldier Paul Bäumer and his comrades: high school boys who idealistically enlist only to be forced to adapt to the horrors of trench warfare by abandoning their own humanity.“All Quiet” first arrived on the big screen in 1930, in a feature directed by Lewis Milestone that won two Oscars and still appears on lists of the best Hollywood movies. A 1979 CBS color version, starring Ernest Borgnine and Richard Thomas, strove for visual authenticity a few years after the end of the Vietnam War.But Edward Berger, the director of a new, lavish version arriving on Netflix on Friday, said his film included a perspective that helped it capture the antiwar spirit of the original novel better than its predecessors: For the first time, a German-language team is behind the writing, directing and acting.The impact of the country’s two brutal — and fortunately unsuccessful — world wars on the collective German consciousness informed how Berger approached the project.“We all grew up with the subject inside of us,” he said. “We inherited it from our great-grandparents.” He added, “It colors everything you have, your opinion, your sense of aesthetics, your taste in music.”Berger, whose previous work includes “Deutschland 83,” the popular Cold War-era spy series, said he couldn’t pass up the chance to adapt “All Quiet” for the screen in the shadow of recent geopolitical developments in Europe.The actor Daniel Brühl, who produced and starred in the film, said, “It was really interesting to be able to show the essence, and the essential message, of Remarque’s book, which is an antiwar book, that there is nothing heroic in war.”Production began on “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 2021, and it is Germany’s submission for best international film at the 2023 Oscars. Reiner Bajo/NetflixThe resulting feature, which will be Germany’s submission for next year’s international film Oscar, also arrives as Russia wages a land war in Europe, the most significant armed conflict on the continent in nearly eight decades.Production began in 2021, a year before Russia marched into Ukraine, but this “All Quiet” echoes some aspects of that ongoing conflict. Bäumer and his fellow soldiers are promised the war will be over in a matter of weeks, just as Russia apparently planned to hold victory celebrations in Kyiv just days after attacking Ukraine. And the film’s young soldiers, preoccupied with their own survival, are seemingly unaware they have invaded another country, just as Moscow has falsely claimed that territories within Ukraine now legally belong to Russia.Berger said he had felt, in countries like Germany, the United States and Hungary, a distinct change in public discourse in recent years. In the rawer language being used, he saw a new ascension of totalitarian politics — and renewed relevancy for “All Quiet on the Western Front.”“This film seems timely, somehow, because this kind of language existed also in 1920, where there was this patriotism and blindness — and we know where that can lead,” Berger said, referring to the ascension of the Nazis.To emphasize the horrors of war and the risks of blind patriotism, Berger’s production departs from the novel that gave the film its name.At a crucial point in the plot, a quarter of the way into a nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, the film briefly stops following the humans engaged in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the last century to focus on an inanimate object.The viewer observes the journey of a dog tag — one of the metal badges worn by soldiers as identification — from the moment it leaves a soldier’s corpse in the trenches of northern France until it is recorded and counted by senior officers in Germany 18 months later.Not only is it a memorable way to show the toll the conflict took on a generation of young people (about 10 million soldiers were killed in World War I; more than 20 million were wounded), but it also opens onto a wider historical view: The list of deaths is handed to Matthias Erzberger (played by Brühl), the member of the Reich government who signed the armistice to end the war in November 1918.Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl in the film) was fiercely criticized in Germany following World War I.Reiner Bajo/NetflixIn moments like this, instead of purely focusing on a small band of fictional soldiers trying to survive, as Remarque does, the film weaves in historical fact, juxtaposing life in the trenches with strategy meetings between higher-ranking players in German command, like the cease-fire negotiations.“The cuts back and forth between the big politics and the life of the protagonists give us an idea of how the ordinary soldier is at the mercy of these decisions,” said Daniel Schönpflug, a historian whose work focuses on that era.The film shows how, by the fall of 1918, more than 40,000 Germans were killed on the front every two weeks. We also discover that, even as Erzberger signed the armistice, the German generals running the country’s disastrous military campaign criticized him for ending the slaughter without having “won” anything in return.In Germany, criticism of the efforts to stop the conflict eventually festered into the “Dolchstoss Legende,” or the stab-in-the-back myth, the false narrative that the war was lost because Jews and social democrats sold out the country.The film’s final battle scene has military barbarism triumphing over rational thought, and Bäumer’s honed animal instinct wins out over his humanity. In Berger’s more historically minded version of “All Quiet,” this battle is just a preamble to worse things.“I thought it was important to show that the end of the First World War was used to start a second one, to put that into historical context,” Berger said.The film shows how, by the fall of 1918, more than 40,000 Germans were killed on the front every two weeks. Reiner Bajo/NetflixBrühl sees the film’s narratives as also resonating with the political divisions highlighted by the war in Ukraine.“What I find so shocking is that in this globalized, connected world, when the chips are down, these fronts can form so suddenly and in such an extreme way,” Brühl said.“It’s a pretty bitter realization,” he added. More

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      ‘Peaceful’ Review: A Homage to French Filmmaking

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      Emmanuelle Bercot’s drama about a man diagnosed with late-stage cancer plays like a eulogy for a nearly bygone era of French cinema and its stars.Tracing the final months in the life of an acting coach named Benjamin who is suddenly ravaged by cancer, “Peaceful,” by the French writer and director Emmanuelle Bercot, contains soap-opera levels of melodrama. It also features one too many subplots that appear out of nowhere — to frankly humorous effect — while the film’s intended comic beats often get lost in translation.The film frequently dips into unintentional absurdity, yes, but it also captivates, thanks to the powers of the Gallic film-world heavyweights Benoît Magimel (playing Benjamin) and Catherine Deneuve.Because of these actors, and a subtly self-reflexive script by Bercot and Marcia Romano, “Peaceful” also plays like a eulogy to a nearly bygone era of French cinema. At 48, Magimel isn’t exactly old news, but the actor, who, at the beginning of his career, starred in iconic films like “La Haine” (“Hate”) and “The Piano Teacher,” represents a kind of national stardom. The presence of Deneuve — playing Benjamin’s devastated mother, who, at one point, cradles her son like the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s “Pietà” — speaks for itself.When Benjamin is informed of his late-stage cancer diagnosis, he fends off the doom and gloom by defensive sarcasm and plunging into work, instructing his pupils to re-enact scenes of difficult goodbyes and mournful departures. The cancer quickly overtakes him, and, soon enough, he’s in a hospital bed going through the various stages of grief, with anger turning into fear and, eventually, something like wizened acceptance.Benjamin strikes up a friendship with his genial doctor, enters into a romance with another one, fends off advances from a devoted student and grapples with the guilt of abandoning his now teenage son, who shows up midway through the film. It’s a dull aside that fails to evoke any of the resonance one would expect from the arrival of a long-lost child.Early on in the film, Benjamin asks his students to define “presence,” that slippery quality that only true stars possess. They’re unable to come up with a satisfying answer, so the camera cuts to Magimel; glowing and passionate, his face pulls us in. Moments like these make Bercot’s otherwise wobbly drama a decent attraction.PeacefulNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More